Jason Schreier's review for Kotaku came out this morning (I'm surprised the embargo for the reviews is still centered on the original release date!) and, well, I personally don't care much about spoiling how this game is and isn't the same thing, but I'll spoiler block the most interesting bits for those who just need to know if this thread's speculation is correct. Know that the review contains this sentence early on: "For the bulk of its run time, Final Fantasy VII Remake is a glorious retelling of Final Fantasy VII’s story."
"The answer is simple: Everything’s new. In what will surely be unwelcome news to Final Fantasy VII purists, this remake extends many old scenes and even brings in some brand new ones. The skeleton of the plot remains the same—Avalanche still blows up a couple of reactors; Cloud still meets the flower girl Aerith by falling into her church; your crew still invades Shinra’s headquarters—but the details are all different. It’s as if Final Fantasy VII were the outline of a school paper and Final Fantasy VII Remake is a grad school thesis."
"It isn’t just the city that’s built up and overhauled. Dialogue exchanges that took seconds to read in text bubbles in Final Fantasy VII are several-minute cutscenes in Final Fantasy VII Remake. Plot threads that were hinted at in Final Fantasy VII are now fully explored, while chunks of the old game that made no sense have been revised, like the Honeybee Inn, which in the original game is a bizarre brothel. In the remake, it’s something new—a highlight of the game that comes off as surprisingly progressive."
"Aerith is one of the most improved aspects of this project. In 1997, she was presented as a spritely ally, but the garbled English script lost many of her best lines. In the remake, she feels like a brand new person—a lively, spiritual florist who’s as comfortable cracking a joke as she is connecting with the planet. Final Fantasy VII‘s Aerith was charming—Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Aerith is a lovable goofball. The remake gives her more time to speak and to interact with the other characters, including some wonderful buddy-buddy scenes with Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. Through those moments, you get a chance to get to kn"
"Some of the setpieces feel straight out of Uncharted, complete with death-defying leaps across falling debris. Midgar is as beautifully gritty as anyone might hope, and this remake offers a close-up perspective that helps you see the city’s class struggle more intimately."
"Every flashback to Cloud’s razed hometown of Nibelheim or hint about Sephiroth’s clones joining together for Reunion was just a reminder that we wouldn’t actually see those scenes in the game. Every new character or extended dungeon felt like it was taking away time that could have been devoted to chunks of Final Fantasy VII that I knew wouldn’t be in here, like Junon, the port city built around a giant cannon that you visit shortly after Midgar. I wanted to see Final Fantasy VII Remake’s take on the beach resort Costa del Sol, or that glorious flying theme park, the Golden Saucer. I was prepared to burst into tears at… well, I won’t ruin that one thing. (You probably know the thing.)
"Then I got to the end and realized that, without spoiling anything, the game’s developers were more or less asking what it means to remake a video game. How faithfully do you have to stick to the script? Just how much, if anything, do creators owe their biggest fans, the ones who have spent so many years begging for a release like this?"
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